Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Below is examples of our program9th Grade Capstone ProjectLine Following Robot Project - Design of a ultra fast line following robot project for student engineering
technology project. Worked in conjunction with Electronics Engineering,
Drafting and Precision Machine Technology provided a “canned” project.
Robot would follow a black line (electrical tape) on the floor autonomously,
via infrared led and infrared photo transistor. The engineering student
program an algorithm in the Arduino. Students assemble the electronics and
build a custom machined chassis and wheels. Students would “tune” the
program to different track conditions.

10th Grade Capstone Project“Blimpy” Blue-tooth Controlled Blimp Project - Design of a ultra light modular control system for student engineering
technology project. Worked in conjunction with Electronics Engineering,
Drafting and Precision Machine Technology provided a “canned” project.
Students assemble electronics and program the project, both in the Arduino
IDE and a custom application on the cell phone using MIT APP inventor,
scratch programming. Student would also design custom 3-d printed chassis
in Solid Works

TV-B-Gone
(Exploratory
Project) – A universal
remote control allows you to turn virtually any TV On or OFF. We
prefer OFF. You control when you see TV, rather than what you see.
The TV-B-Gone remote is so small that it easily fits in your pocket
so that you have it handy whenever you need it, wherever you go:
airports, restaurants, laundromats, etc. TV-B-Gone is a type of
Universal Remote Control which works by shining pulses of invisible
light that tells most any TV to turn OFF or On.

During our 5 day exploratory students build and take home ten unique
projects. In an effort to reduce cost to the district I designed my own
projects and documentation at a tenth of the cost of purchasing an off
the shelf kit from a electronics supplier, Cost of my kits runs about
$1.50 each.

Friday, April 26, 2019

The design I came up with was a pager size device that would alert a pilot there ELT or Emergency Location Transmitter was on. A lot of time

NBEMS is Narrow Band Emergency Message System. Think back to your last public service event, drill, or deployment. You probably passed a lot of traffic best suited for voice communications but...What if you had been asked to pass Roster of evacuees, Required prescription medications, Directions to a disaster scene. The needs of our Served Agencies have changed. They still need voice communications but...There's an increasing need for data communications. We need to be able to provide more than just voice communications from a ham with an HT when we got called out to search for these ELT's they were false alarms in fact over 59 out of 60 of my documented finds were false activation's. I wanted to design a product that a pilot could wear or throw in his fight bag that if there was a signal on 121.500 Mhz (121.775 prototype) and was less than 200 feet away it would beep.

Narrow Band Emergency Message System Interface
NBEMS is Narrow Band Emergency Message System. Think back to your last public service event, drill, or deployment. You probably passed a lot of traffic best suited for voice communications but...What if you had been asked to pass Roster of evacuees, Required prescription medications, Directions to a disaster scene. The needs of our Served Agencies have changed. They still need voice communications but...There's an increasing need for data communications. We need to be able to provide more than just voice communications from a ham with an HT

The Ignition Switch Delay for APRS node
"The Ignition Switch" featured in QST Aug09. This circuit provides protection against transient protection when starting your car and proves a delay off time for APRS equipment to send data before shut-down.

This air-powered launcher is designed to launch sabot round over trees towing fishing line. The fishing line is used to pull up nylon twine and wire antennas, or heavier line and larger antennas. These launchers are used by Amateur Radio groups doing Emergency Service and other portable work, as well as installing antennas in backyard trees.

N1IR Tape Measure Beam AntennaHere is an article I wrote for the next GARS Club Meeting. During the
next club meeting on 3/26, we will be constructing Direction Finding
(D.F.) antennas made from PVC pipe and steel tape measures, the nice
thing about this antenna you can transmit on it as well with a pretty
good SWR. A Kit is available for this antenna build just shoot me an
email.

Echo Link Demo Video
EchoLink is a computer-based Amateur Radio system distributed free of charge that allows radio amateurs to communicate with other amateur radio operators using Voice over IP (VoIP) technology on the Internet for at least part of the path between them. It was designed by Jonathan Taylor, a radio amateur with callsign K1RFD.

Astron Power Supply Fix
We were contacted by a local HAM radio operator that is blind about a power supply that runs his HF radio. The power supply was a ASTRON 30 and did not function. The students were excited about taking on this job, we troubleshot the problem down to a faulty regulator and bad crowbar circuit protection. The student got to learn about transistor Voltage Regulator and Silicon Controlled Rectifier used a a over voltage crowbar protection circuit.

This circuit was to monitor a Sealed Lead Acid Battery, if the battery drop below 10.6 volts a buzzer would sound. The challenge was to have a quiescent current smaller that the self discharge rate of the battery